Not since the Science of Healing opened its doors to the Science of Prevention have physicians scored a greater victory in their fight against disease and death than on the Isthmus of Panama. Not only did they help to build the canal; they demonstrated that tropical diseases are capable of human control and thereby opened up a vista of hope undreamed of to all that sweltering and suffering mass of humanity that inhabits the Torrid Zone. CHAPTER X THE MAN AT THE HELM In 1905, William H. Taft, then Secretary of War, made a trip to the Isthmus of Panama to look over the preparations for the construction of the Panama Canal, and at the same time to consider the question of the fortification of the big waterway. On that trip a member of the General Staff of the Army, who at that time was but little known outside of Army circles, went with him. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, bronze-faced, gray-haired man, 47 years old. He came and went unheralded. Few people knew of the engineering record he had made, and no one on the Isthmus dreamed that he was destined to become the commander in chief of the army that would conquer the Isthmian barrier. He returned to the United States and wrote his report--a report which, from the deep mastery of the subject it revealed, attracted the favorable attention of the Secretary of War. Later when the board of consulting engineers came to make its report upon the type of canal which should be built--whether it should be a sea level or a lock canal--the Secretary of War asked this officer to prepare a draft of his report to the President recommending the lock canal. Soon after New Year's Day, 1907, the chief engineer of the canal, John F. Stevens, dissatisfied with the relations that existed between the Government and himself, came to the conclusion that he could not build the canal hampered as he was by red tape at Washington. It then became a question of whether or not the canal should be built by contract or by the Army. President Roosevelt asked for a preliminary report upon this proposition and the unheralded Army engineer who had visited the Canal Zone in 1905, made it. A few days later there was a conference between President Roosevelt, Gen. Alexander MacKenzie, Chief of Engineers of the United States Army, and the Secretary of War. After this conference Maj. George Washington Goethals was summoned to the White House and informed by the President that it had been determined to build the Panama Canal under the auspices of the Army, and that he was appointed chairman and chief engineer of the Isthmian Canal Commission. He was requested to keep the fact of his appointment a secret and to prepare immediately to go to Panama. A ship sailed for the Isthmus three days thereafter, and he was ready to sail when the President advised him that he might wait over and arrange affairs in Washington, leaving in time to get to the Isthmus to take charge on the first of April.